Mar. 12th, 2012

The foundation provides mentorship and funding to a small but growing group of college-bound students. They are pretty unique in that they don't only provide scholarship money to fill the gap between what the students receive through grants and other scholarships to pay for their college of choice, but they also choose their recipient students during their Sophomore year in high school, providing them with three years of one-on-one mentorship to realize their aspirations.

The design firm that is doing this is inFuze Marketing, whose tagline is 'creating impact without noise'. Our concept design teacher brought in the owner of the firm and one of her designers to talk to us and give us the project.

The design actually needs to appeal primarily to funders. They hold gala events and golf tournaments and the like to bring in money and donors. The logo will be embroidered onto golf shirts and high-quality tchotchkes.

My ApproachAs part of the identity design, I'm wanting to make a personal connection from the students to the contributors. Reinforce that these are SPECIFIC people with dreams and aspirations. The pencil-tool 'my' at the bottom of futurefaces.jpg is a placeholder. My idea is that there could be small sections of the personal stories of FF students, with a picture. The students are taking posession of the foundation, calling it "My Future; My Future Foundation".

I feel like making it more personal like that will speak more directly to the contributors. Rather than being a faceless 'random high school student' that their money helps, they will see the type of people that are being supported, learn a little about their stories, and maybe even see a reflection of their younger selves in the students, causing them to remember the ways they might have been helped up the ladder as they grew, and recognizing themselves in a position to help these individuals in turn.

As for the actual execution... I'm not sure if I like the disjointed bottom half of the face treatment. That might not be the best way to do it, but I feel like that leaves me at a bit of a loss to what to do instead. I still like the logo direction itself- the hand-drawn font for future speaks to fresh growth, while the solid slabs of foundation gives that growth a sturdy medium for growth. I'm looking at bold, fresh colors as well, which feels like the right direction, though I have no idea whether that will appeal to the older, more conservative financial contributors.